Black Tickets
Authors: Jayne Anne Phillips
BLACK TICKETS
“Extraordinary.… Phillips is a wonderful writer, concerned with every sentence and seemingly always operating out of instincts that are visceral and true—perceived and observed originally, not imitated or fashionably learned.… Phillips shines brightly.… This is a sweetheart of a book.”
—John Irving,
The New York Times Book Review
“The unmistakable work of early genius trying her range, a dazzling virtuoso range that is distinctly her own. Jayne Anne Phillips is ‘the real thing.’ ”
—Tillie Olsen
“Remarkable.… Hers is an authentic and original voice.… [
Black Tickets
is] just cause for celebration.”
—
Newsweek
“Phillips writes a knockout prose. Hold on to your seats!”
—Annie Dillard
“
Black Tickets
is the work of authentic genius.… Phillips … is indeed an awesome talent.… From the first sentence of the book … her prose has you in its thrall. It is precise, tough, glistening with images.… You want to read every word.… Her writing has an astonishingly tactile quality. You do not read her stories. You feel, hear, see them.… The range of stories here is impressive.”
—
Newsday
“Phillips’s prose is audacious, musical, and fresh. She is unafraid, and seems almost possessed by the American language. Her work has depth, and power, and I admire it enormously.”
—Frank Conroy
“Her writing burns a white heat, deriving intensity from the most everyday situations as easily and expertly as from glaring exotica.… She makes even the most public acts intimate.”
—
Atlanta Constitution
“Phillips casts a brilliant, fluorescent light.… She is pitiless. She is gifted. She must be read.”
—Robie Macauley
“[A] virtuoso collection.… Phillips’s use of language is richly sensuous. She takes street slang all the way to poetry and back, hovering on the edge of surrealism but … always sustaining a lucid narrative flow.… Dazzling dramatic monologues … the sheer range of subject matter, and the lively cast of characters … drawn from all the nooks and crannies of American urban and country life, declare the tireless researcher as well as the exuberant stylist in Ms. Phillips.… She has the power to bring us to the quick of physical sensation. She can write both with supreme simplicity and with metaphorical bravura.… These stories have, of course, their forerunners and ‘influences’—Joyce, Steinbeck, and Plath.… But they also possess a freshness and intensity entirely their own. Few enough writers at any time have the power to take language and polish it until it is sharp and gleaming again. Phillips is one of them.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“These are wonderful stories. Jayne Anne Phillips displays energy, artistic poise, and electric talent.”
—Tim O’Brien
“Phillips’s writing hangs together, like the monologue of a rapt seer, random bits of the world fused together in the self-willed power of her vision.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
“Phillips is an awesome talent.… She writes as though possessed.”
—
The Indianapolis Star
“This woman is part witch, all poet, and a fabricator of passionately told stories.”
—Frederick Busch
“Phillips explores mercilessly the human condition, attempting material few other writers have dared. Even fewer have succeeded as she does in conveying the raw emotional content of their themes while … transforming it with a poet’s vision.”
—
The Plain Dealer
“Jayne Anne Phillips is a stunning writer. She tells about the pains and pleasures of being a woman with surgical honesty and a tenderness that touches the heart.”
—John Leggett
“Phillips wonderfully catches the tones and gestures in which familial love unexpectedly persists even after altered circumstances have made it impossible to express directly, and the ways in which grown children, while cherishing even an unrewarding freedom, can be caught and hurt and consoled by their vestigial yearning for dependence, safety, a human closeness that usually seems forever lost.”
—
The New York Review of Books
BLACK TICKETS
Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. She is the author of one other collection of widely anthologized stories,
Fast Lanes
, and three novels,
MotherKind, Shelter
, and
Machine Dreams
. She has won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Bunting Institute fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction. Her work has been translated into twelve languages.
Jayne Anne Phillips
MotherKind
Shelter
Fast Lanes
Machine Dreams
LIMITED EDITIONS
The Secret Country
How Mickey Made It
Counting
Sweethearts
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2001
Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Jayne Anne Phillips
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence Books, New York, in 1979.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The author would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation of Yaddo for their assistance.
Some of the stories in this book first appeared in the following publications: “Wedding Picture” in
New Letters;
“Home” in
The Iowa Review;
“Sweethearts” and “Under the Boardwalk” in
Truck Magazine;
“Lechery” in
Persea;
“Gemcrack” and “El Paso” in
Ploughshares;
“1934” in
Canto;
“Solo Dance” in
North American Review;
“The Heavenly Animal” in
Fiction International;
“Happy” in
Paris Review;
“Souvenir” in
Redbook;
“Slave” in
Loka 2;
“Cheers” in
Attaboy;
“Snow” in
Fiction;
“Country” (as “Easy”) in
Big Deal IV;
“Blind Girls,” “The Powder of the Angels, and I’m Yours,” “Stripper,” “Strangers in the Night,” “What It Takes to Keep a Young Girl Alive,” “Satisfaction,” and “Accidents” in
Sweethearts;
“Sweethearts,” “Under the Boardwalk,” and “Blind Girls” appeared in
Pushcart Prize II, Best of the Small Presses;
“Home” and “Lechery” appeared in
Pushcart Prize IV, Best of the Small Presses
.
Lyrics from “Some Enchanted Evening” by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II: Copyright © 1949 by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright Renewed. Williamson Music, Inc., owner of publication and allied rights. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Lyrics from “Ball and Chain” by “Big Momma” Thornton: Bay Tone Music Publishers and Criesteval Music. Used by permission. Lyrics from “Under the Boardwalk” by Arties Resnick and Kenny Young: Copyright © 1964 by The Hudson Bay Music Company. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Lyrics from “A Summer Place” by Max Steiner & Mack Discant: © 1964 Warner Bros., Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Jayne Anne, 1952–
Black tickets / Jayne Anne Phillips.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80881-3
1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.H479 B58 2001
813′.54—dc21 2001026079
v3.1
Our souls were clean,
but the grass didn’t grow.
—Van Morrison
“Streets of Arklow”
from
Veedon Fleece
Characters and voices in these stories began in what is real, but became, in fact, dreams. They bear no relation to living persons, except that love or loss lends a reality to what is imagined
.
M
Y MOTHER’S ANKLES
curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Under the cloth her body in its olive skin unfolds. The black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth. My mother’s eyes are round and wide as a light behind her skin burns them to coals. Her heart makes a sound that no one hears. The sound says each fetus floats, an island in the womb.
My father stands beside her in his brown suit and two-tone shoes. He stands also by the plane in New Guinea in 1944. On its side there is a girl on a swing wearing spike heels and short shorts. Her breasts balloon; the sky opens inside them. Yellow hair smooth as a cat’s, she is swinging out to him. He glimmers, blinded by the light. Now his big fingers curl inward. He is trying to hold something.
In her hands the snowy Bible hums, nuns swarming a honeyed cell. The husband is an afterthought. Five years
since the high school lover crumpled on the bathroom floor, his sweet heart raw. She’s twenty-three, her mother’s sick, it’s time. My father’s heart pounds, a bell in a wrestler’s chest. He is almost forty and the lilies are trumpeting. Rising from his shoulders, the cross grows pale and loses its arms in their heads.
I
’M AFRAID
Walter Cronkite has had it, says Mom. Roger Mudd always does the news now—how would you like to have a name like that? Walter used to do the conventions and a football game now and then. I mean he would sort of appear, on the sidelines. Didn’t he? But you never see him anymore. Lord. Something is going on.
Mom, I say. Maybe he’s just resting. He must have made a lot of money by now. Maybe he’s tired of talking about elections and mine disasters and the collapse of the franc. Maybe he’s in love with a young girl.
He’s not the type, says my mother. You can tell
that
much. No, she says, I’m afraid it’s cancer.
My mother has her suspicions. She ponders. I have been home with her for two months. I ran out of money and I wasn’t in love, so I have come home to my mother. She is an
educational administrator. All winter long after work she watches television and knits afghans.
